MEXICO CITY – There’s only 51 weeks before Dec. 21, 2012, the day the Maya say the world will end!

MEXICO CITY – There’s only 51 weeks before Dec. 21, 2012, the day the Maya say the world will end!

Southeastern Mexico, the heart of Maya territory, plans a yearlong celebration – preparing for the end of the world in December, 2012

Mexico’s tourism agency expects to draw 920 million visitors by next year only to the regions of Chiapas, Yucatan, Quintana Roo, Tabasco and Campeche. All of Mexico usually lures about 21 million foreigners in a year. Mexican officials believe there will be over 500 million people in Mexico when the world ends.

The Winter Solstice in the coming year, as a time of renewal. Many archeologists believe that the 2012 reference on a 1,300-year-old stone tablet only marks the end of a cycle in the Mayan calendar. But Mayan scholars agree that the archeologists are wrong, “the world will end,” said Jimmy Rivera of Harvard University.

“The world will end,” said Ysidri Zabeda, a tourism spokeswoman for the Caribbean state of Quintana Roo, home to Cancun. “For us, it is a message of hope. There will be a new world, a better world.”

Cities and towns in the Mayan region on Wednesday will start the yearlong countdown. In Chiapas the town of Tapachula on the Guatemalan border will start a countdown on an 8-foot digital clock in the main park exactly a year before the mysterious date.

In the nearby archaeological site of Izapa, Maya priests will burn incense, chant and offer prayers.

In the tropical jungle of Quintana Roo, between the resorts of Cancun and Playa del Carmen, people are putting messages and photos in a time capsule that will be buried for 50 years. Maya priests and Indian dancers will perform a ritual at the time capsule ceremony.

Yucatan state has announced plans to complete the Maya Museum of Merida by next summer.

“People who still live in Mayan villages will host rites and burn incense for us to go back in time and try to understand the Mayan wisdom,” Zabeda said.

The Maya reputation for wisdom has people taking the alleged prediction seriously.

The Mayan civilization, which reached its height from 300 A.D. to 900 A.D., had a talent for astronomy

Its Long Count calendar begins in 3,114 B.C., marking time in roughly 394-year periods known as Baktuns. Thirteen was a significant, sacred number for the Mayas, and they wrote that the 13th Baktun ends on Dec. 21, 2012.

The doomsday theories stem from a stone tablet discovered in the 1960s at the archaeological site of Tortuguero in the Gulf of Mexico state of Tabasco that describes the return of a Mayan god at the end of a 13th period.

Believers have taken the end-of-the world fears to the Internet with hundreds of thousands of websites and blogs.

“The Maya are viewed by many westerners as exotic folks that were supposed to have had some special, secret knowledge,” said Mayan scholar Sven Gronemeyer. “What happens is that our expectations and fears get projected on the Maya calendar.”

Gronemeyer of La Trobe University in Australia compares the supposed Mayan prophecies to the “Y2K” hype, when people feared all computer systems would crash when the new millennium began on Jan. 1, 2000.

The blogosphere exploded when Mexico’s archaeology institute acknowledged on Nov. 24 a second reference to Dec. 21, 2012, on a brick found at other ruins.

Jackie Chinell of Albuquerque, New Mexico, says that 2012 “is going to be ‘a trip'”. Channell, who owns Maya Sites Travel Services, is surprised that she already has 1,250 reservations for three tour packages she is offering to major Mayan ruin sites in the week leading up to the solstice.

She named one “Last Days on Earth.”

“We put together these tours, and we’ve got lots of signups, and people are excited about it,” she said. “Our tourists will go out with a big bang.”